Tips for Building Fluency Through Phonics and Decoding
The other day, I had the pleasure of sitting down with the one and only Sarah Paul, the mastermind behind Sarah’s Teaching Snippets. She’s a current reading interventionist for K-3rd and a prior first-grade teacher. As with many of the experts on my podcast, she too was a balanced literacy teacher who found that her students were struggling to read and weren’t sure why. So, she set out on her own science of reading journey in order to learn more about how kids really learn to read. Through this, Sarah’s Teaching Snippets was born and now she helps educators teach reading the right way.
Where to Find Sarah:
Blog - Sarah’s Teaching Snippets
YouTube Channel - Sarah’s Teaching Snippets
Instagram - Snippets by Sarah
Today, we’re asking Sarah all of our fluency questions and getting some awesome answers. Through this conversation, we chat about what exactly fluency is, how we can help our kids achieve fluency, and the importance of it. Let’s go!
What Is Fluency and Why Is it Important?
Fluency is the ability to read at a steady pace, with accuracy and appropriate expression. It’s the ability to read smoothly without stopping and going. Sarah mentions that fluency used to be all about rate - but it’s actually so much more than just reading at a comfortable, conversational pace. It’s about reading with expression, prosody, and accuracy. All of these are important components of fluency - and if it sounds like a lot to learn, well, it is! That’s why Sarah says fluency is the literacy component that students tend to hang on to the longest. It takes a while for students to become masters of it.
But nevertheless, fluency is so important because it allows us to deeply understand what we are reading. If students are spending all of their brain power decoding words, they cannot have the space in their brains to also figure out what they’re reading. The more fluent the child, the more likely they’ll be able to comprehend what they're reading. Fluency really is the bridge that closes the gap between decoding and being able to actually read. Remember that the “end game” of reading is for students to comprehend and learn about what they’re actually reading. Fluency gets students there. But as stated before - the fluency bridge is long, and some students hang out here for quite some time before they become masters. Let’s explore what this looks like at each grade level.
What Does Fluency Look Like at Each Grade Level?
Sarah states that we need to look at the three components of fluency, which are accuracy, automaticity, and prosody (expression). Looking at these three components helps us understand what is developmentally appropriate for each grade level to do.
Kindergarten: Sarah believes that accuracy and automaticity are what we should focus on for word recognition. And where does this start? Yep, you guessed it - the letter level (both names and common sounds). It’s important that when students are seeing these letters that they are first recognizing their sounds with accuracy. Once that’s accomplished, they must move on to automaticity. When they see a letter or grapheme, we want them to say it without pause. They should know these sounds right away because if they do, decoding will be easy and quick. Timed tests are perfect for this and can give us an accurate depiction of whether or not students know the grapheme with automaticity. After automaticity has been achieved, we then move on to decoding where students go through a few phrases. They start out slow, and then gradually do it faster and faster with more practice. If your students are still decoding slowly, we need to go back and ensure that they’re automatic - not just accurate.
First Grade: Students enter this grade knowing a few words that they have automatic recognition with. In first grade, we still must ensure that each grapheme we teach them can be automatic because remember - phonics and fluency go together like peanut butter and jelly. It’s in first grade where we can also focus on rate. Sarah likes to say that “Rate is a consequence (or an outcome) of accuracy and automaticity.” If students are accurate and automatic, their rate should get faster and faster. As they make their way down the scope and sequence, we should see students’ rates naturally improve. Also at this level, we can begin to focus on prosody and ask ourselves the following questions: Are they reading with good expression? Appropriate tone? Are they stopping at punctuation? Are they using a good narrative voice? Are they scooping phrases correctly? At the first grade level, lots of kids may have that automatic word recognition but have trouble grouping words together. This is where scooping comes in handy! More on that later in this blog post.
Second Grade: While you’ll still work on word recognition at this point, second grade is where we really can get into the details of prosody and reading with expression. This is the level where we can move students from reading word for word to actually scooping phrases and reading with appropriate tone, voice, pace, and minding punctuation. It’s here where you’ll really touch on these components of literacy. We encourage you to think of it like building blocks - one right on top of the other. We begin at the kindergarten level with sound recognition, accuracy, and then automaticity. Then we continue to add on blocks as we work on decoding, reading with phrasing in mind, and prosody. Much like we teach phonics explicitly, fluency needs to be taught explicitly as we keep adding those blocks.
What Are Some Activities That Promote Fluency?
As stated before, we must teach fluency like we do our phonics - explicitly. We’ve rounded up some of Sarah’s favorite activities for teaching fluency, and they do not disappoint! Keep in mind that the following activities should be taught with a great amount of intentionality because these are the stepping stones to fluency. These activities are listed in order of levels (word → phrase → sentence → scooping → decodable texts). This is a great way to organize them since we think about fluency as a building block. We start small and then grow.
Word Level Activities:
Practice graphemes- At the beginning of each lesson, take just a minute (really, it only takes one minute) to go through graphemes that they’ve already learned for automatic letter recognition. In this pile, you can also include graphemes that are still new to them.
Decoding drills - These come disguised in an array of names and you’ve seen them everywhere - but their idea is the same! Decoding drills are a great opportunity to see words over and over and to practice fast decoding.
Display a chart (on a piece of paper or a pocket chart) where words are in a 5x5.
Each word in each row is the same but mixed up in a different order. This is great for cumulative review because they’re not only reviewing the same words in each row - they’re getting that automaticity practice.
Students read them across each row.
To mix it up with a fun game, number each row and have students roll dice.
Whatever number they roll, they say the words that are located in that row.
This would be for words they have already learned so they can work on automaticity.
Phrase Level Activities:
Pocket chart phrases - With this activity, Sarah likes to view it as kids climbing a hill instead of a mountain. When students are given just three-word phrases, the idea of completing them and reading them fluently isn’t as intimidating. This activity shows students that words go together and are meant to be read in a certain way. It’s telling the students that decoding and fluency go hand-in-hand and words become more meaningful when you phrase them.
Teachers put a phrase on the board or in the pocket chart, such as “in a cab”, “on the lake”, “the wet dog”, or something simple.
The teacher and students “scoop it” together by running their index fingers over the words and grouping them together.
Sentence Level Activities:
Sentence reveal - For this activity, we can start with simple sentences so we can give students the confidence to move on to more complicated ones. These simple sentences not only get repeated reading practice, but it also reiterates the idea that words go together.
Write simple sentences on the board or on a sentence strip.
With either method, tuck, cover, or fold the sentence with construction paper and slowly reveal what the sentence says.
The teacher reveals one word: “Let’s whisper read this word together. What’s the word?”
Students whisper the first word.
Repeat the same strategy with the second word.
Before the third word, read all the words you’ve read so far and then sound out the third word.
Read all of the words together and watch kids get more fluent with each try!
Prefer something techier? This works well on PowerPoint slides too!
Sentence scramblers- This activity shows students that words work together to create meaning.
Take a simple sentence such as, “I see the red pen.”
Write each word on a different index card.
Mix them all up and display them in a pocket chart or on the table.
Ask students, “Which word comes first and which comes last?”
Students will choose the first word with the capital and the last word with punctuation.
Teacher: “Great. Let’s see what words you can find that would make sense to come next.”
Students then have to read all of the words and figure out the order in which to put them so the sentence makes sense.
With each attempt, students re-reading each word that comes before the next one for that repeated practice and automaticity.
After they’ve built the sentence, they’ve actually read it five times already!
Sentence pyramids
Take a simple sentence, such as “The hen is in the pen.”
Write the sentence in a pyramid style, where the word the is on top, and on the second line the hen, and on the third line the hen is.
Keep creating new lines until the sentence is completed and the words form a pyramid shape.
Students make their way down the pyramid, reading the words over and over.
Scooping Level:
Scooping Practice - As stated before, scooping phrases helps students realize that words go together. This helps with their fluency - specifically prosody and cadence.
Write a simple sentence on the board, such as, “A cub has a nap in the den.”
Model it for them first. Teacher: “The words a cub go together. And I feel like having a nap goes together. The words left are in a den, and those words sound like they belong with each other.”
With this strategy, only do what you think the students can handle. Ease into it with an I Do, We Do, You Do strategy. The teacher scoops first, then together, then the students do it on their own.
Teachers can read the phrases to students and have them create the scoops. To reverse, students can read while the teacher makes the scoops.
Reminder: Scooping is not how we really read, right? We don’t read in small phrases - our end goal is to read in full sentences fluently. Consider scooping as a stepping stone from reading word for word to reading fluently.
Decodable Texts: Amie - I added this one in here even though Sarah didn’t touch on it, but you did at the very end. I thought it was appropriate since this is the “end game” portion, but feel free to delete it if you want!
Once students are ready to graduate to decodable texts, be sure to give them a variety so that they can find one that interests them.
Reading decodable texts fluently is a great way to instill confidence in kids.
Doing so will also help them comprehend what the text is about.
Once students have mastered fluency in decodable texts, teachers can give them comprehension questions to see if they’re searching for meaning while reading.
If your students are reading a decodable text fluently, don’t be one and done! Toss it in a folder or bin they can easily access so they can continue reading it as a cumulative review.
Have a kid who’s already fluent in their reading? Don’t change a thing! Have them keep reading and being a model for other students. These specific strategies and activities are for students who are still decoding or reading word for word. As to not get overwhelmed, we will do well to view fluency as made up of small building blocks that you add one at a time. Just like with phonics, we must teach this explicitly with lots of cumulative reviews weaved into its fabric. We hope you’ve learned a lot about fluency and how you can incorporate it into your classroom. Thank you, Sarah, for all of your helpful snippets!
